Remembering Shoppers World: Woolworths’ early Argos-style experiment

It’s always good to receive updates on former Woolies sites that I’ve previously featured here at Soult’s Retail View, so I was pleased to get an email yesterday from Martin, a regular Midlands-based contributor.

He told me that he’d visited both Burton upon Trent and Coalville in the last couple of days, and that both town’s ex-Woolies still show no sign of imminent reoccupation. Indeed, Coalville’s seems to have taken a step backwards, with Martin reporting that “The ‘Mather Jamie’ sign is still up but has reverted to ‘for let’ rather than ‘under offer’ as was the case when you last visited.”

Former Woolworths, Coalville (24 Aug 2010)

It would be interesting to discover which retailer had got as far as making an offer for the 24,612 sq ft property, and what caused the transaction not to go ahead. Meanwhile, according to the Mather Jamie website, interested parties can snap up the unit for a rent of £50,000 a year.

Interestingly, Martin was also able to reveal a little more about the Coalville Woolies’ past, telling me that he could remember a ‘Shoppers World’ being incorporated into the store in the late 1970s.

Shoppers World frontage and interior shots, from Woolworths Virtual Museum

Launched by the then still US-owned F W Woolworth & Co Ltd in September 1974, Shoppers World – seemingly with no apostrophe – was an early chain of “catalogue discount stores”, similar in concept to Argos, whose first stores had opened in July 1973. Information on the chain is surprisingly hard to come by, but piecing together details from various sources gives at least a partial picture of Shoppers World’s rise and ultimate fall.

It’s perhaps ironic that the Woolworths Virtual Museum – formerly hosted at museum.woolworths.co.uk – closed along with the rest of the Woolies website following the business’s collapse into administration in 2008, at just the time when its detailed reflections on Woolworths’ history would have been most useful.

“…new for the 1970s was “Shoppers World” – a Catalogue Shop. This was a first for the UK, at a time when agents sold catalogue items from Littlewoods and Great Universal Stores in the home, normally on extended credit terms.”

“The only High Street catalogue “shopping” were stores that exchanged collectable coupons and tokens given away as a sales incentive with purchases for goods. Cigarette and petrol companies and some supermarkets gave coupons or Green Shield Stamps, which could buy goods from a catalogue. These were ordered by post or (in the case of Green Shield Stamps) could be collected in High Street redemption centres. Some years later [1973, as noted above] the Green Shield Stamp shops became Argos.”

“Shoppers World were the first to sell items from a catalogue for cash or on credit for immediate collection in store.”

Richard A Hawkins’ useful 2009 conference paper, The Inﬂuence of American Retailing Innovation in Britain: A Case Study of F. W. Woolworth & Co., 1909-1982, gives a bit more detail on store locations (p.128), noting that the chain was launched in Leeds, and initially comprised 14 shops – 13 of them converted from Woolworths – in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds. At the time, the Yorkshire Post reported that the Leeds store was in the Merrion Centre, and would be opening on 12 September 1974. As I blogged before, the Merrion Centre later played host to an eponymous Woolworths store (pictured below), which opened in the 1980s – does anyone know whether this was the same location as the former Shoppers World?

A rather small and indistinct map on the Woolworths Virtual Museum site shows the extent of the Shoppers World chain in 1975, though the key is obviously wrong – the black dots are clearly Woolco (including the three North East stores at Killingworth, Washington and Thornaby), while the red ones are Shoppers World. I’ve corrected the annotation on the version reproduced at the top of this blog post.

It’s difficult to make out how many red dots there are – about 20, I reckon – but it clearly shows that the 1975 Shoppers World estate was still very much focused on the West Midlands, North West and Yorkshire, plus the single store in London, opened in September 1975, that Hawkins refers to in his paper. By the end of the decade, the chain had expanded to 52 stores – presumably including the shop in Coalville, as well as one in Harrogate that James Masterson mentions in his blog – and was apparently breaking even. Argos, by comparison, opened its 100th store, in Derby, in 1980, so Shoppers World hadn’t done too bad a job of keeping up with the growth of its competitor.

However, despite having a decent-sized estate of nearly-profitable and reportedly popular stores, the whole Shoppers World business was closed down following the 1982 split of British Woolworths from its US parent, and its purchase by Paternoster Stores. By April 1983, Hawkins notes, the last of the 43 remaining Shoppers World stores were shut, ending a dalliance with catalogue retailing that had lasted less than a decade but presumably incurred some considerable expense.

Big Red Books from 2006, 2007 and 2008

In his fascinating Doctorvee blog, Duncan Stephen – web editor at St Andrew’s University, and a former Woolies sales assistant – highlights the closure of Shoppers World as a “blunder of Woolworths”. He notes how the belated introduction of The Big Red Book, in summer 2006, was essentially a reinvention of the catalogue concept that Woolies had abandoned more than two decades earlier, but executed, this time around, in a manner that was “inept” and “doomed to fail”.

If Woolworths struggled to beat Argos when the latter had just 100 stores, competing with a 700-plus-strong Argos chain was always going to be a tall order – particularly if, as Duncan argues, stock availability from The Big Red Book was consistently poor, and resulted in consistently disappointed customers. After just a couple of years, The Big Red Book was scrapped in late 2008, but too late to save a business that by then was on the brink of administration.

No-one can really predict how things might have turned out if Woolworths had stuck with Shoppers World instead of abandoning it. Duncan Stephen remarks that “maybe if they [Woolworths] persevered they would never have had to worry about Argos.” On the other hand, it might have proved an expensive disaster, and yet another distraction from the core Woolies business. Indeed, even Argos has seen its growth stall in the last couple of years, as the big supermarkets have muscled further into its territory in both bricks and clicks. However, Argos’ most recent, and much-reduced, half-year profit – of £54.4m on sales of £1.81bn – is still a figure that Woolies could only have dreamed of in its latter days, as it barely managed to scrape a profit on sales of around £3bn.

By pulling together some of what we know about Woolworths’ Shoppers World experiment, I’m hoping that this post will prompt further discussion and insights. Can you remember the locations of Shoppers World stores close to where you were at the time? What are your memories of shopping in the stores? And what became of the sites following the chain’s closure? If you have any comments do post them below, or if – by some miracle – you even have a 1970s or 80s photo of a Shoppers World store, I’d be thrilled if you were willing to share it. As always, you can submit images for potential inclusion in the blog using the contact form.

17 Responses

When the new Spring Hill estate was built in Birmingham in the early to mid 1970s, the shopping centre which was built at the same time included a Shoppers World, as well as a Co-op and a number of independent shops. Never having come across an Argos up to this point, this was my introduction to the concept of catalogue shopping, and as a child, particularly in the run up to Christmas, it led to many hours annotating pages and circling toys.

The Shoppers World store did occupy the Home Bargains unit in about 1978. I remember visiting the store and its entrance was inside the Merrion Centre opposite Morrison’s.

The unit that was vacated by Shoppers World (can’t remember who was there after they left but before Woolworths took over) and around 1986 was occupied by Woolworths who had downsized from their Briggate Leeds store until Woolworths closed down due to the company going into administration.

The former Woolworths site on Briggate in Leeds city centre was taken over by House of Fraser who have continued to occupy the site since then.

I worked in the shoppers world store in derby in victoria st istarted at 16 when i left school in 1979 till the store closed i THINK IT WAS EARLY 1983 our manager was called to a a meeting on the day we heard the news on the radio in the shop that the stores were closeing was not even told about it i loved working there and have very happy memories

I remember that Evesham’s Woolworths had a Shoppers World (I so want to pop an apostrophe in there!!), right at the back of the store. Suffice to say, it didn’t last long, and then the store was shortened to make way for the brand new Abbey Gates (now called Riverside) Shopping Centre. I would been about 5 at the time of Shoppers World, but unlike many, I do actually remember it!!!

Re your appeal for info regarding the location of both the former Shoppers World and Woolworth store in The Merrion Centre in Leeds. they definitely did not occupy the same unit.The Shoppers World had a street facing frontage along Woodhouse Lane approximately where there is currently a small Sainsburys store and I think may have interconnected with main interior mall although I’m not totally certain of this, whereas the Woolworth store was within the mall where the Pound store is that you show a photograph of.
Hope this helps.
Love the site.

Shoppers World was before my time, but it is interesting to think what has happened to all the old Woolworths store locations in the last couple of years. This is perhaps one of the most significant changes on the high streets of the UK in my lifetime.

Excellent – thanks Adam! I’m starting to wonder how many Shoppers World stores were actually on newly acquired sites, as opposed to being a) a former Woolies or b) a carved-off portion of an existing Woolies.

Woolworths… from the archives

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Soult's Retail View is a blog by me, Graham Soult, taking a wide-ranging look at the UK retail industry. I'm a retail consultant based in Gateshead - and the person behind CannyInsights.com and CannySites.com - so my posts often (but not always) have a North East flavour. [read more]

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